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CybersecurityCompliance

Cybersecurity compliance: Why is it so important?

Cybersecurity compliance: Why is it so important?

There’s no doubt that cybersecurity is a deep world with lots of aspects and complexities.

From different types of attacks to types of hackers, it’s important to learn its main aspects to have a deeper understanding of this matter. However, as many companies do not have that mindset, there are some industry rules in play to protect the end user. One of those things is the compliance rules and laws that companies have to follow to ensure they have a solid structure against potential attacks.

What exactly is compliance? Why is it so important? What are their advantages? In this article, you’ll learn about these aspects and why compliance is key to cybersecurity in any company.

Cybersecurity Compliance controls

When we talk about compliance, we refer o the rules and regulations that a certain company or organization have to fulfill in a mandatory way. This is defined both by the country they operate in, as well as the industry.

Being compliant in cybersecurity is extremely important for any company or organization, especially the ones that work with technology. This means having more rigid security controls and strong data protection.

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With this, your company’s reputation is also protected: if your information is preserved, clients will also be more confident to trust you, because they’ll understand that their data will also be sheltered.

This data is usually protected by certain technologies and protocols companies have to respect. This happens because data is sensitive and if companies don’t have an appropriate framework, attacks are more bound to happen.

Companies that don’t follow compliance guidelines have to pay some penalties and may suffer what we know as a “data breach” - a.k.a, sensitive data from users or employees being released without permission -.

The most known compliance controls in cybersecurity are

  • CIS.
  • NIST Cybersecurity Framework
  • ISO 27001.

Now that we know what cybersecurity compliance is, let’s dive into how it works.

The responsability owner

Even though companies have to respect different cybersecurity compliance frameworks, they may vary depending on their size, industry, and country.

That’s why the first recommendation is to figure out which regulations apply to your company’s country or region (you may be surprised by the differences a company in LATAM could have from one operating in Europe or USA!).

Then, it’s also important to have a person who is responsible for the fulfillment of compliance regulations and controls. Usually, more prominent companies have someone in charge of security processes, usually a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer).

However - and taking into account that having a CISO is quite exclusive and requires a bigger budget - smaller startups may have a CTO (Chief Technology Officer), a Head of cybersecurity, or COO (Chief Operations Officer) to fulfill this role.

As you can see, there are diverse regulations for all kinds of industries. However, the most common technique that is used to be compliant is pentesting.

Cybersecurity compliance basics

How is this achieved? With this technique, ethical hackers find vulnerabilities in systems and suggest ways to fix them to prevent potential attacks.

They act like regular hackers - the bad ones - and try to get into the company’s system in creative and counterintuitive ways. They basically have to think like them to see which vulnerabilities are out there and how to fix them.

Once they have all the findings, a report is delivered to the company with a description of each vulnerability divided by criticality and a standard compliance report. With this last file, they are already compliant.

Check out Strike’s pentesting plans and see what’s the best option for you.

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